Back in my glory days at Kinko's, we had a regular customer that no one working at the store wanted to see. I'll call him Bad Peter, as is this is in no way shape or form his name.
Peter would come in with his things to copy and hand them to you with this too wide smile. You'd do your job, same as you did for everyone else, and hand them back to him. And you would hope he'd pay and leave.
Because you're an optimist.
What would really happen is Peter would look at the copy and find something wrong with it. A smudge. A speck. Something. Anything.
Worse, he sometimes look at you and say, "That's crooked, isn't it?"
You'd look at it and it would be dead level, nothing wrong with it. You'd pull a fellow co-worker aside and they'd say the same. You'd pull strangers off the street and they won't know what the hell was supposed to be wrong. That's a damn perfect copy. You only spent ten minutes of your life making sure it was a damn perfect copy. The hell, man. The Hell.
Peter would be sure it was crooked. If he could see it, the people he was going to show it to would see it. And he wasn't going to show an inferior copy to Them.
It wouldn't do any good to point him to the self-serve, because at some point he'd come back to the counter and ask for help. And "Couldn't you just do just this one?" And this and that and the other. And as you're trying to get him out the door, your work is backing up and you know you're never going to finish and why won't he just go, go, go.
Most frustrating.
Deep down, I wanted to help Peter out most thoroughly, but Kinko's frowns on misuse of the hole punch.
Can't see why.
All of this is a round-about way of saying I've been a Bad Peter. I've been fiddling and fiddling with this site, trying to get it just right. Again. As always.
I started thinking about when, over at my Aunt Jeri's house, I checked my blog and saw that her computer didn't show things quite the same was as they appeared on my computer. In fact, things looked all too familiar.
I suspected what wrong right from the start, and it just took a quick check at home to confirm things. Since December I've been using Mozilla Firefox, and it looks fine. On Explorer however, we have drooping sidebar.
And I hate drooping sidebar.
It bothered me and bothered me and bothered me until I couldn't stands no more. I changed to a different template, one that had areas for background images, and started modifying. Getting everything just so.
Things are fine now. The blog looks nice. Real nice. It seems to me that every change was better than the one before. Got Krevan in the header, the little Wizard Dude in the sidebar, and the Goblin At the Foot of the Bed at the bottom of the page. Perfect. Smooth. Looks real professional, even.
Only.
Only this wasn't right. And that wasn't right. And maybe I could do something over there.
Sure, my family can't see it, the strangers I pull off the street can't see it, but I can see it. And my readers might see it. And I don't want that happening.
So I fiddle with it. And fiddle with it. And fiddle with it again.
Wondering all the while where I can find a really good hole punch so I can put myself out of my misery...
Peter would come in with his things to copy and hand them to you with this too wide smile. You'd do your job, same as you did for everyone else, and hand them back to him. And you would hope he'd pay and leave.
Because you're an optimist.
What would really happen is Peter would look at the copy and find something wrong with it. A smudge. A speck. Something. Anything.
Worse, he sometimes look at you and say, "That's crooked, isn't it?"
You'd look at it and it would be dead level, nothing wrong with it. You'd pull a fellow co-worker aside and they'd say the same. You'd pull strangers off the street and they won't know what the hell was supposed to be wrong. That's a damn perfect copy. You only spent ten minutes of your life making sure it was a damn perfect copy. The hell, man. The Hell.
Peter would be sure it was crooked. If he could see it, the people he was going to show it to would see it. And he wasn't going to show an inferior copy to Them.
It wouldn't do any good to point him to the self-serve, because at some point he'd come back to the counter and ask for help. And "Couldn't you just do just this one?" And this and that and the other. And as you're trying to get him out the door, your work is backing up and you know you're never going to finish and why won't he just go, go, go.
Most frustrating.
Deep down, I wanted to help Peter out most thoroughly, but Kinko's frowns on misuse of the hole punch.
Can't see why.
All of this is a round-about way of saying I've been a Bad Peter. I've been fiddling and fiddling with this site, trying to get it just right. Again. As always.
I started thinking about when, over at my Aunt Jeri's house, I checked my blog and saw that her computer didn't show things quite the same was as they appeared on my computer. In fact, things looked all too familiar.
I suspected what wrong right from the start, and it just took a quick check at home to confirm things. Since December I've been using Mozilla Firefox, and it looks fine. On Explorer however, we have drooping sidebar.
And I hate drooping sidebar.
It bothered me and bothered me and bothered me until I couldn't stands no more. I changed to a different template, one that had areas for background images, and started modifying. Getting everything just so.
Things are fine now. The blog looks nice. Real nice. It seems to me that every change was better than the one before. Got Krevan in the header, the little Wizard Dude in the sidebar, and the Goblin At the Foot of the Bed at the bottom of the page. Perfect. Smooth. Looks real professional, even.
Only.
Only this wasn't right. And that wasn't right. And maybe I could do something over there.
Sure, my family can't see it, the strangers I pull off the street can't see it, but I can see it. And my readers might see it. And I don't want that happening.
So I fiddle with it. And fiddle with it. And fiddle with it again.
Wondering all the while where I can find a really good hole punch so I can put myself out of my misery...
2 comments:
I've always thought the site looked just fine. But, then again, I'm a Good Henry.
On one level I agree.
Then, on the other hand, I look at the site as it is now, and I say, "How could I have ever stood the other way?"
Anal, maybe. But I yam what I yam.
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